What it takes to unclog leadership bottlenecks

Last week, an investigative report from IGN looked at the internal culture of animation studio Pixar, which laid off 14% of its staff a month before its highest-grossing film of all time, “Inside Out 2”, hit theatres in June.

The report alleges that the layoffs, extreme work crunches and denied bonuses contributed to an environment of burnout. But it also includes complaints about Chief Creative Officer Pete Docter, an executive producer of “Inside Out 2” who multiple sources said served as an unofficial co-director.

While some credited Docter with the film’s success, others cited a “god-like worship” of the CCO.

“You cannot do anything without Pete. Literally nothing,” one former employee said. “And that creates a bottleneck.”

These words offer a reminder that leaders who demand absolute control and oversight can actively hurt productivity and morale in one fell swoop.

Those who have an executive audience would do well to surface this incident as an example of how leaders can model effective workflows. If leaders can’t communicate a standard and drive that behavior in their reports without letting go, they aren’t effective leaders.

How can communicators who have executive ears help?

First, you have to diagnose the bottleneck.

Conducting root cause analysis

As with any tense conversation, coming with data and receipts helps bring down the emotional charge of accusation about bottlenecking. This is where conducting a root cause analysis can help you determine why the bottlenecking is happening. It could be unclear priorities, micromanagement, missed deadlines or late decisions. It could also be a combination of multiple factors.

This root cause analysis involves:

• Defining the bottleneck by documenting specifically how leadership is delaying a project as it’s happening. This will make it easier to share back. Focus on specific actions (or inactions) and connect those behaviors back to specific delays and missed deliverables.
• Collecting data from email threads, meeting minutes, or metrics from any project management tool the leader is working in. Interviewing internal stakeholders and leadership to collect their thoughts on the project’s progress helps here, too. Bring it back with quantifiable performance metrics like missed deadlines and delayed approvals.
• Uncovering underlying causes using a method like the “5 Whys” technique, which involves asking “why?” repeatedly whenever a problem is encountered to eventually diagnose the symptom of the root cause.
• Analyzing the causes by prioritizing which contributing factors wreak the most havoc on the project’s timeline.

Once you have this analysis in tow, you’re ready to talk to the leader and develop an actionable solution to your bottleneck.

Brainstorming actionable solutions

Chatting with those affected by the bottleneck can start with sharing the results of your analysis and brainstorming specific solutions around them.

Coming to leaders with potential solutions is the best way to ensure they receive the team’s feedback and concerns as constructive and solution-based. Don’t dwell on the problem and spend more time talking about potential process fixes that will help.

In fact, don’t call it a “problem” at all—put on your PR hat and refer to an issue as an “opportunity”. Neutral, non-blaming language is more likely to foster a productive discussion and a collaborative mindset.

Augmenting the decision-making processes

Using the specific solutions uncovered in your brainstorm as a guide, you can propose streamlined processes for workflow that includes rethinking the decision-making process.

The answer may be a better project management system, but tech won’t magically get disengaged leaders to buy in. Drafting decision-making processes for leadership, and presenting them with the specifics, removes a layer of tech that absent-minded leaders or those who are not digital natives may hide behind.

Consider defining clear paths for escalating a project by asking your leader to define who has decision-making power at each stage in the workflow. Shared ownership creates accountability by reducing the dependency on one person to keep things on track.

While tools like Asana and Trello can help here, the act of getting the leader to decide who the co-owners are themselves, rather than have everything assigned by a separate project manager, fosters a deeper level of accountability.

Ask your leader if they’re willing to commit to an easy template or framework that assigns ownership. We like the RACI framework, which designates different stakeholders who are Responsible, Accountable, Consulted and Informed at various stages in the process.

Reinforcing accountability

By this point, hopefully you and the leader have agreed to try out a new solution. But the work isn’t done— keeping the leader, and all stakeholders accountable requires flexing your comms muscles.

Include structured check-ins as part of the agreed-upon workflow to create guideposts for the leader along the process. These check-ins should:

• Assess whether the agreed-upon decision and approval points are working.
• Address what unanticipated ad-hoc interruptions are getting in the way and how to reduce them.
• Analyze the effectiveness of the feedback process, with a focus on driving the leader’s commitment to deliver it at specific, timely stages in the project rather than at the leader’s whim.

At the end of each chat, remind the leader you’ll be sharing minutes with the wider project team as a means to foster two-way transparency.

Managing expectations with two-way transparency

This process won’t necessarily be a one-and-done effort or a permanent solve. Old habits die hard.

When more delays happen, you can mitigate any ripple effects by setting new, realistic timelines for the team. This manages expectations by letting them know you’re aware of the delay and working to minimize their frustrations with the breakdown in the process.

Providing status updates to the leader lets them know what consequences the bottleneck has created for your team’s workflows—and what other priorities may need to go on the backburner as a result.

Communicating the impact of these delays maintains pressure and fosters accountability, and doing so couched in the language of actions and inactions keeps your goals focused squarely on improving productivity.

Follow this approach and you gain the power to embed communications soft skills across the business by couching them in tangible practices.

It’s one of the many ways to ensure that the influence of comms is not only seen in products and deliverables, but felt in everyday behaviors, too.